I’m still feeling my way around this substackery business, and I have, right now, two thoughts I’m thinking.
Thought 1: I imagine that you are mostly here for the copyediting-type stuff, and that the other stuff (as, for instance, below) may or may not be amusing to you (hopefully may) but is not the main attraction. In fact, I fear that it might be the opposite of an attraction: a fatal disattraction, as it were.
Thought 2: I’ve been aiming to post once every five to seven days, which I’ve decided is a good pace. And I’m wondering whether if I post too often (for instance, I just posted yesterday), it begins to accrue a kind of “oh lord here he is again” feeling in your email inbox. I mean, we all have so much to read, don’t we.
I will be grateful if you feel like noting your impressions in the comments, because truly: On the one hand I write to amuse myself (and to stay in practice when, otherwise, I’m largely reading and taking notes for Book The Next, which means that my days are often about writing but aren’t really writing), but on the other hand I’m writing so that people will want to read what I write. And I know what my lane is, even if I don’t feel the need always to stay in it (and likely won’t).
Thank you for wading through all that earnest sincerity, ye gods.
So now you get a story:
Today is the Colleen Dewhurst centennial!
I’ve been told two spiffing Colleen Dewhurst stories, one of which I have no intention of repeating here, but let’s just say that it takes in Maureen Stapleton, Zoe Caldwell (in absentia), Roddy McDowall, and Miss Helen Hayes. Colleen is also, now that I think about it, in absentia from this story. Perforce, one might even say.
But the other one simply takes in Colleen (then Mrs. George C. Scott) and the aforementioned Maureen, and it takes place during a late and sozzled evening at the Scotts, at some point during which Mr. Scott rose from his chair, grabbed Ms. Stapleton by the neck, and began to throttle her.
To which Ms. Dewhurst, looking up from her own chair and taking in what was going on, blithely commented: “No, George, I’m over here.”
(By the way: If you’ve never seen The Exorcist III, (a) it’s one of the greatest horror films ever made, including one the scariest jump scares known to humankind, and (2) it features Colleen as the Absolute Voice of Literal Hell opposite George, by then her ex-husband.)
I must add that I was honored to see Colleen Dewhurst a number of times onstage, starting with Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten when I was in high school and, years later, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, in which she was the most astonishing Mary Tyrone I’ve yet seen in my life.1 I will always recall how she delivered the play’s famous final line (“I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time”) not as a Famous Final Line but simply as the thing that Mary says before the next thing she’s about to say and the thing after that. She said it simply, wistfully, almost matter-of-factly, and then the curtain immediately dropped without fanfare, as if the Tyrones were just going to keep playing out their drama back there on the now concealed stage long after we in the audience had gone home, made ourselves a hot toddy and put out the cat, and gone to bed.2
The James Tyrone in that production was, to be sure, Jason Robards, and he was also, to be sure, phenomenal. The pair of them, Dewhurst and Robards—so associated and entwined that I bet that many people thought they were married, the way people thought that Betty Comden and Adolph Green were married3—were playing this Long Day’s Journey in rep with (yet more O’Neill, except funny) Ah, Wilderness!, and it was fun to see the two of them as the comedy’s genial married elders basically goofing off for the entire evening and being charming. What a relief it must have been.4
Also, I once stood behind Colleen Dewhurst in a Times Square deli as she was buying a buttered bagel. She was, as I recall, much tinier than I was expecting her to be, because I was expecting her to be eight feet tall.5
Thanks once again for dropping by. See you in the funny papers and/or in the comments.
The next installment of A Word About…, which I promise you you will not be reading in the next ninety minutes, will (I also promise) be copyeditorially oriented.
—B
And that includes Vanessa Redgrave, who was devastatingly, heart-tearingly brilliant, so that’s how good Colleen Dewhurst was.
I recall saying to an actress friend, thinking of the Earth Mothery impression that Colleen Dewhurst tended to make from the stage, “How is that big strapping woman going to play frail, birdlike, drug-addicted Mary Tyrone?” To which my actress friend sensibly replied, “She’s going to act it, Benj.”
For the record, Jason Robards was famously married, for a time, to Lauren Bacall, the Widow Bogart, and Adolph Green was married thrice, the last time to delightful Phyllis Newman. Betty Comden, as long as we’re here, was married to a non-showbiz gentleman called Siegfried Schutzman, who did eventually take on the name Steven Kyle. (Well, wouldn’t you.)
The Edmund in that Long Day’s Journey was Colleen’s own son Campbell Scott, and the Jamie was the stalwart Jamey Sheridan. They too got to ham-and-egg their way through Ah, Wilderness!
How in fact tall was Colleen Dewhurst? 5′ 8″. So: not tiny. Shorter than I am, but not tiny.)
I adore your writing!
I love the diversions. And I greet your appearance in my inbox with a delighted "oh, goody."